The All Progressives Congress (APC) had recently approached the court, seeking an order restraining the Federal Government from deploying military personnel for the conduct of governorship election in Osun next month.
Jega who spoke at an interactive session with news managers in Abuja, disagreed with people who said the deployment of soldiers in Ekiti State during the June 21 governorship amount to militarisation.
According to him, while he was adverse to military rule in the country, he was in support of the role the military has played so far in ensuring that voters are encouraged to come out and vote, and accused some politicians of creating excuses to undermine the electoral process.
“People raised the issue of militarisation in Ekiti State. By the strict definition of militarisation, I am a student of politics and military rules.
I have even published papers on militarisation. So, I know the definition. So, there is no way anybody can conceivably define what happened in Ekiti as militarisation of electoral process. The electoral process in Ekiti Election was not militarised.
Yes, there was heavy security presence but I don’t think it can be conceived as militarisation”, Jega added. He advised on careful use of words, noting that the concern of people was that there should not be overbearing presence of military on election day.
“The military performs what we describe as peripheral outer cordon. It is the mobile police that handles internal movement in terms of movements in the towns but away from polling unit.
And it is unarmed policemen that you have on an average of three per polling units, and that is exactly what happened in Ekiti”, the INEC Chairman explained. He assured all preparations have been made to ensure a free, free and credible election the August 9 Osun governorship election, noting that the commission has taken note of the peculiarities of the state, which he said is more populated than Ekiti state.
According to him, while Ekiti has 16 local government areas with voter population of about 700,000 Osun which has 34 local government areas, has a voter population of about 1.4 million.
The INEC Chairman described as painful for the commission, the removal of the Resident Electoral Commission (REC) for Osun State, Ambassador Rufus Akuje, despite of the none availability of evidence to support allegations that he was partisan.
Jega further assured the determination of the commission to conduct elections in all parts of the country, including the three states where there is state of emergency.
Source: New Telegraph
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